>I think the thing you must remember is that organized labor isn't locked
>into the Democrat Party anymore and I say this as a registered Democrat.
>Many prominent union leaders have made this perfectly clear---either you
>support our issues which are the peoples issues or you don't get the votes,
>the money and the help!
>It's a whole new deal.
None of that's new. What was new was the fact that Gingrich et al had so intimidated traditional union-supported moderate Republicans that they were voting party-line against unions during the 1995-96 session. This led to a full-scale movement of union dollars against the GOP in a more partisan manner than the unions had traditionally engaged in. Now, the moderate GOPers are reasserting some degree of independence and politicians like Peter King and Jack Quinn of New York are hanging out with labor again.
But union money is still going overwhelmingly to Democrats. To give some idea, here are the numbers for the 1997-98 election cycle from the Center for Responsive Politics (who have a complete database of all political contributions at www.opensecrets.org)
Total labor PAC contributions: $45,250,851 To Dems: $40,964,632 To GOP: $4,162,944
And most of the union contributions to the GOP are from the building trades, transportation industries or public sector unions. Private sector industrial unions and service sector unions (SEIU, HERE, 1199) give almost nothing to the GOP.
To give some comparisons of business PAC contributions to the Dems: Agriculture: $5,013,478 Defense: $4,587,680 Construction: $1,777,827 Energy & Nat. Res. $4,382,887 Finance/Insur./Real Est. $12,573,334 Health $7,922,531 Lawyers/Lobbyists $4,622,326 Transportation $3,915,696 Misc. Business $4,274,977
While these dollars are heavily supplemented with individual business contributions, the labor dollars are in turn heavily supplemented with volunteer labor for those they endorse. The Center for Responsive Politics actually tracks individual contributions and places them within business contributions if the person works in management for a firm.
It is notable that labor unions are a significant share of the funds Dem use to get elected. Even a top Democrats like David Bonior get almost 39% of identifiable money from labor unions (as opposed to 48.4% from business sources.)
The fact is that for most politicians, pissing off the AFL-CIO matters a hell of a lot more for their survival than pissing off either their party leadership of Bill Clinton. Whether the AFL-CIO is getting their money's worth is a different debate, but party leadership has a lot less financial leverage over Dems than the labor movement.
--Nathan Newman